My archaeological mission to India and Pakistan by Wheeler Mortimer

Author:Wheeler, Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Archeological Survey;Tribes, India; Indians; Clans, India
Published: 1976-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

that was not content to prepare himself by hunger only for the satisfaction of a greedy appetite.

With somewhat wider foresight Pliny might have anticipated that Alaric the Goth was to demand 3,000 lbs of pepper in his treaty with the Romans in a d 408. There for the moment we may pause . .. but only to turn back in our list to the infinitely knowledgeable Pliny, who reminds us (Natural History, VI, 101) that ‘in no year docs India absorb less than fifty million sesterces’, an extraordinary efflux such as Tiberius may have had in mind when he complained to the Roman Senate of the reckless exportation of money.

But on the assumption that Tiberius’s budget-figures were approximately correct the question inevitably rises in the mind of the listener: how was this seemingly extravagant export-cash utilized effectively in partibus orientalibus? Broadcast exchange was scarcely in question, for in no part of India was there any viable interrelationship of coin-values, any considerable native currency of gold or silver to which the Roman coinage could be approximated in marketpractice. As late as the second century ad, in the time of Pausanias, it is recorded that the Indians exchanged their wares with those of the Greeks ’without understanding the use of money’. The potin or lead struck by the Andhra Empire of central India in the first two centuries ad implies a certain understanding of the monetary principle and may so have been incidental to the occasional introduction of gold and silver Roman coins (aurei numerous but denarii predominating) 1 brought no doubt from Malabar on the west and by w r ay of the Coromandel coast and the river-system on the cast, although be it repeated and emphasized that a generally productive and accessible site such as our ‘ Arikamedu’ on the Coromandel coast has so far failed to yield a single Roman coin to extensive and often meticulous excavation, and we there still fall back on specific ceramic evidence. For the rest the numismadc aspect of our evidential problem has an alternative answer which I find for the most part fully satisfactory. It is sufficiently evident that the imported coinage, consisting exclusively of gold and silver, was employed normally in the Indian

1 W. F. Grimes (ed.). Aspects of Archaeology, Essays presented to O.G.S. Crawford, (London. 195 x) PP. 345 - 81 .

traffic not as currency but as bullion weighed in exchange for goods, like bullion in an Indian bazaar today.

Unhappily not one of the identified Indo-Roman trading stations or emporia has yet been sufficiently excavated to reveal its extent, shape or substance. Apart from assemblages of pottery and other small finds discovery has largely been confined to disjecta which rarely combine into any life-size and coherent picture. For that we are still primarily dependent upon the grace and curiosity of the Tamil poetry of the earlier centuries ad, without which much of our story would bean and one indeed. Often but not excessively cited Is the famous epic known as The

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